Cluster

GeoSemantics II / Notes in Defense of the People of Light and Whispers: Rethinking the Image to Stay with the Problem of Living in a World in Ruins

By Sebastian Wiedemann

In “Hidden”, the image here thus indicates not as what is given to be seen, but what is always to come. As a speculative form, it makes possible what is given to be seen in its fugitive condition. In the imaginative existential plane that we defend here, there is no place for spectators, since all matter, in claiming to be active, puts itself forth as filmmaker in whose intervals the image insists, the images as interstitial modes of existence in themselves, as ima(r)gins1 that here we speculate to call People of Light and Whispers.2

If politics is a problem of perception, cosmopolitics is a problem of proliferation of perceptions as fractures and portals between divergent worlds. Thus, the cinema that we defend here, not as an aesthetic derivative, but as a cosmogenetic principle, far from all dualism and representation, or as Alfred North Whitehead3 would say, far from all bifurcation of nature, claims to be cinematic perspectivism. The image is always an ima(r)gin as an edge phenomenon if we think with Deleuze and Guattari, which is not given to remain however long it lasts.4 Image then, conceived as a fragile and contingent anomalous margin that opens into a sea of unlimited genesis. Ima(r)gin as sea of images, as co-creation and co-existence of practices of care for natures to come in.

Hence, the audiovisualities with which the “Oculto/Hidden” (2021–2023), filmed in the Peruvian latitudes, express themselves as follows:

The celestial bodies enunciate something in the midst of their mystery. The moon turns red, the planet weeps, the fall is deeper than we could imagine. Something lurks. In the middle, a requiem or perhaps an elegy. The uncertain as a path that leads us to a catastrophe that we do not know if it is past, present, or future. But that is undoubtedly a deep memory of a dark secret.

: :

Endnotes

  1. Term coined by the author to refer to the simultaneous existence of the image as an image and a margin.
  2. Sebastian Wiedemann, “Co-Errancias Políticas Con La Imagen: Recados Del Pueblo Dela Luz y Los Susurros.,” in Desejar o Menor Dos Mundos, Escrever Corporeidades Outras Desde Aí, ed. Maria dos Remédios de Brito, Lindomberto Ferreira Alves, and Dhemersson Warly Santos Costa (Belem: UFPA, 2023), 81–90. Sebastian Wiedemann, “El Pueblo de La Luz y Los Susurros: Imágenes Que Inventan Escuchas.,” El Mundo, 2016, sec. Palabra&Obra.
  3. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007).
  4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mil mesetas: Capitalismo y esquizofrenia (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1994).

  • Sebastian Wiedemann

    Assistant Professor at the School of Arts of the National University of Colombia. Filmmaker-researcher, PhD in Art Practice, Learning and Philosophy from the University of Campinas (Brazil), as well as Master in Contemporary Arts Studies from the Fluminense Federal University (Brazil). His films have been presented in festivals and galleries in the five continents and have received focuses and retrospectives in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Spain and Ireland. As an author he has published the book "Deep Blue: Future Memories of a Livings Cinematic In-Between" (2019).